Quicktime Problem (no audio, but video looks great)

[pinkoos]

Hi,

I'm running Snow Leopard at 10.6.2 on my Macbook. I Tivo'd a 30 minute local newscast yesterday evening b/c there was a 2 minute interview with one of our friends and she was wondering if we could burn it to DVD, etc.

Anyway, it recorded just fine in Tivo (beautiful 1080p). I have a Dashboard Widget (forgot the name and I'm at work right now) that connects to your Tivo and allows you to transfer recorded shows onto your Mac.

So, I performed this transfer (over our wireless network). Took quite a while, but finally ended up with a 3.2GB file on my desktop in the .mpg format.

Here's the problem. Quicktime opens up and plays the file just fine, except that there is no audio. To test if there is a problem with the file itself or with Quicktime, I opened it up using VLC and it played (and sounded) perfect. Also, opened it up in Toast Media Player and, again, video/audio were perfect.

So, it seems there is an issue with Quicktime. Maybe the format that the audio was recorded in is not compatible with Quicktime (I know Quicktime is pretty finicky when it comes to what it can and can't play).

Regardless, I really wanted to have it work in Quicktime b/c it has that great trim/send to YouTube feature. I want to trim the 2 minute interview out of the 30 minute segment and at least send that to our friend. The trim works great, but there's no audio again.

Any ideas on:

A. What the underlying problem could be?
B. What other freeware is out there that could easily let me do this?
C. I have iMovie, but whenever I've used it, it seemed a bit complicated, though I didn't try it this time. Is iMovie a viable option?

Thanks.

[Will Collier]

The audio is probably in AC3 format if it came from a Tivo (check the Movie Properties in Quicktime Player 7).

As for most A/V issues, install Perian and see if that fixes things.

[pinkoos]

Will Collier wrote:
The audio is probably in AC3 format if it came from a Tivo (check the Movie Properties in Quicktime Player 7).

As for most A/V issues, install Perian and see if that fixes things.

Is this what you're referring to?:

http://perian.org/

[Will Collier]

That's it. Not an 100% fix-all for Quicktime video, but pretty darn close.

Might try opening the same file with VLC, just as a sanity check to be sure the audio track is there. VLC will play darn near anything.

[Jimmypoo]

If you check the dropdown menu before recording, it doesn't present an option for recording audio with
video except via microphone built in - or the line-in plug. I'm tempted to route it back in, from headphones to line-in, but until then, I just made one 5 minutes ago - and had to let the mic pic
up a very small signal from the Macbook's built in speakers.

I'm sure if I had externals connected it would have been better, but I think they pulled this to prevent you
from recording streaming movies and/or DVDs.

[pinkoos]

Will Collier wrote:
That's it. Not an 100% fix-all for Quicktime video, but pretty darn close.

Might try opening the same file with VLC, just as a sanity check to be sure the audio track is there. VLC will play darn near anything.

Yeah, worked fine with VLC. I even burned a DVD of the entire broadcast with Toast Titanium and that worked fine. Just seems to be a problem with QT.

I'm at work, but will try to remote in to my Mac at home and d/l, install Perian and see if that fixes it.

[pinkoos]

Jimmypoo wrote:
If you check the dropdown menu before recording, it doesn't present an option for recording audio with
video except via microphone built in - or the line-in plug. I'm tempted to route it back in, from headphones to line-in, but until then, I just made one 5 minutes ago - and had to let the mic pic
up a very small signal from the Macbook's built in speakers.

I'm sure if I had externals connected it would have been better, but I think they pulled this to prevent you
from recording streaming movies and/or DVDs.

Sorry, I may be a real dunce, but I kinda didn't understand anything you just posted!

[Jimmypoo]

I'll have to try what you did - and see if VLC will play audio before I reply. Are you using QT Pro? Or just the version that came with Snow?

[Jimmypoo]

Forget it - I thought you RECORDED it with QuickTime. My mix-up.

[pinkoos]

Jimmypoo wrote:
I'll have to try what you did - and see if VLC will play audio before I reply. Are you using QT Pro? Or just the version that came with Snow?

Just the Snow version. Didn't realize that there was still Pro available. I thought the Snow QT basically rolled the free and Pro versions into one.